Teacher: The disturbing things I’ve learned about our new Common Core tests
Emily Talmage is an elementary school teacher in Lewiston, Maine who did some research on the new Common Core tests that her students are taking this spring. In Maine, students are taking the Maine Educational Assessments in math and English Language Arts, developed by the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, one of the two multi-state consortia given a total of some $360 million in federal funds to develop new exams that align with the Core standards. In this post, Talmage reports on what she found.
By Emily Talmage
As a teacher of 20 vibrant, curious, and, yes, often challenging fourth graders at Montello Elementary School in Lewiston, Maine, I constantly search for ways to improve my students’ learning experiences and to understand what will best help them succeed. So, like many teachers around the state, as I began hearing about the new Smarter Balanced Tests (or MEA) that we are required to give our students this spring, I wanted to know how it would help me with the daily task of getting twenty learners to grow their hearts and minds in meaningful ways.
Here is a brief summary of what I have discovered.
First, no matter what my students and I do, statistics have already shown that my students will more than likely fall below proficient on this test. In the field test given a year ago, 91 percent of English Language Learners and nearly 80 percent of low-income students did not meet proficient. My class is comprised of 40 percent English language learners and nearly 100 percent are low-income. Because new state legislation (required by the federal government if we are to keep valuable sources of funding) has already passed that will link my students results to my professional evaluation, this does not bode well for me or for my colleagues. School “grades” are suspended for one year because we do not yet have baseline data for these tests, but it does not take a statistician to predict that schools like mine, with high levels of poverty and English language learners, will not look particularly good to the public once results are released in 2016.
Second, “assessment experts” (which seem to be primarily business consultants) within major, for-profit corporations like McGraw-Hill, AIR, and ETS were at the forefront of developing these tests. Throughout the process, some teachers were asked for “input” (I was not one of them and I don’t know any teachers who were), but I have found it impossible to discern in what way this input was actually applied. Instead, a number of math and literacy experts have said publicly that many test items are far above grade level and are developmentally inappropriate. It is unclear why their advice was not heeded. Meanwhile, billionaires like Bill Gates and Rupert Murdoch have espoused the incredible potential these tests have to grow the education market. I am certain that they would pleased to know that in Lewiston, we have already clamored to purchase Common Core-aligned products designed by the same companies that have built these tests.
Third, many teachers in states giving the Smarter Balanced Test were encouraged to hear that unlike its well-known counterpart, the PARCC, our particular version of the Common Core Assessment would be “adaptive,” meaning that it would adjust to student’s ability level as they progressed through the test. Some teachers, including myself, find that adaptive tests can be somewhat more useful than those that simply label students according to their level of proficiency, as they have the potential to gauge Teacher: The disturbing things I’ve learned about our new Common Core tests - The Washington Post:
